CAMBODIAN POLITICS: THE PLOT THICKENS...

It's still a bit weird, living in a wildly erratic political environment like the one that exists in lovely, scenic Cambodia.

Case in point: A few days ago, Sam Rainsy, leader of Cambodia's only real opposition party, high-tailed it out of the country. Why? Because he and another member of his party had their immunity stripped for making allegations against the government that the present leadership didn't find particularly pleasant.

There's three main political parties in Cambodia: The Cambodia People's Party (CPP), the party in power, as brutal and corrupt and incompetent as a party can possibly be; FUNCINPEC, which has recently become quite interested in merging with CPP; and the Sam Rainsy Party, which is basically the only voice of dissent in the country.

This is the thing: FUNCINPEC wants to merge with the dominant party, the CPP. Why? Because Cambodian political power is all about diluting foreign aid money and putting it into one's own pockets, and if you're on the outside, not only can you not make any real, lasting decisions, but, more significantly, you can't get a cut of the loot, either. So FUNCINPEC wants in on the coin, in other words.

A merger such as this would not be a good thing; it would leave the Sam Rainsy party as the only true opposition party in the country.

The goverment doesn't like this possibility. They really don't like this possibility. So they're doing whatever they can to get rid of the Sam Rainsy party. Now they've gone and stripped him of his immunity, which basically means they can charge him with anything they want.

It's fascinating and complex and scary. Yes, it is scary, to live in a place that has such a mean-spirited, ruthless, fundamentally indifferent government in power. They are clueless and reckless, and they do not seem to care that their country remains desperately poor and underdeveloped.

Their leader, Hun Sen, is a former Khmer Rouge soldier who defected to Vietnam early on. He's been the prime minister for years and years. He ain't going to give up his power easily, if ever.

But there's signs of hope. There's signals of dissent. A few weeks ago, Hun Sen announced that if he died there would be chaos, that no one else would be able to become Prime Minister.

The next day, one of the leaders in his own party said no, no, that's not the case at all. If something happens to him, well, there are mechanisms in place to choose a successor.

A statement such as this is significant here; it has weight. It's a rare but intriguing example of Prime Minister Hun Sen being openly, publicly contradicted by his own party. What does that show? That shows his own people are turning against him, perhaps. That they want the media and the outside world to know this.

And the plot thickens...

(Not that I'm a political expert, or anything. I'm just trying to piece things together from what I hear, read, observe. But I do know that most of the people do not like the Prime Minister at all, which, in a democracy, would usually mean his days are numbered. Cambodia, though, is a 'democracy' in name only, the same way that 'Dairy Queen' is a 'queen' in name only. )

Okay, okay -- a lame comparison. Been a long day. But it's true. When was the last time you saw anything royal-like in a Dairy Queen? And who would want to be queen of something as bland as a dairy, anyways? Just asking.

For now, things are reasonably stable, as stable as Cambodia can get, if only because the ones with the true power are in power; they control the military, and whoever controls the military controls the land, I think.

Still.

My passport's ready, just in case.

I live not far from the Canadian Embassy.

If worse comes to worse comes to worse, I can always get out, fly away, exit.

There's twelve million others, though, that can't.

STEVEN WRIGHT QUOTE OF THE DAY

If you're driving your car at the speed of light and turn your headlights on, what happens?

ON YOUR OWN

The Super Bowl. The soon-to-be-cancelled NHL hockey season. Steroids in baseball.

Are you interested? Do you care?

Guess what? Millions don't. Scratch that -- billions don't. All popular sports, true, all obsessions that can lay claim to legions of militant followers. Millions of people follow these pasttimes carefully, debating the issues, posting on websites, proclaiming their indifference or allegiance to this, that or the other cause. It takes up time and space and money in all of the major media outlets.

Over here?

Um, not interested. Never heard of the Super Bowl. Ditto for the NHL. Baseball, well, people know of the game (some of them do, anyway -- okay, a few; alright, one guy, who lives down by the river, he's heard of it, I think), but nobody plays it.

What we become interested in. What we invest our hopes, dreams and passions in. What we consider essential to our character, our national yearnings, our fulfillment as people, living breathing organisms separate from our dull, workday lives. All of this means nothing to others. Absolutely nothing.

A little shocking, actually.

You live in a foreign land and you realize that the cultural touchstones you've grown up with are non-existent pretty much everywhere else on the entire planet. The sports that people live and breathe barely even exist. The entertainers are not mere has-beens, but never-beens, unknowns. (You think many Cambodians or Japanese or Hungarians or Russians or Swedes were mourning the death of Johnny Carson a few weeks back?)

What connects us to others and ourselves (however superficial our choices may be) is, voila, gone.

(What does voila mean, anyway? Is it French?)

You can't turn on the radio and hear that familiar DJ's voice. You can't flip on the TV and get comforted by your favorite newscaster soothingly laying out the world's travesties, twenty-two minutes at a time. You can't open up a newspaper and expect to see familiar faces, places, people.

All you can do is step outside and walk the streets and listen to the people and figure out what sports they do play and try to make sense of this world, one day at a time, on your own.